


felled by you / held by you

by notorious



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Canon-adjacent, F/M, two dummies being dumb and in love together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:40:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25149334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notorious/pseuds/notorious
Summary: wynonna never wanted to fall in love with doc.
Relationships: Wynonna Earp/Doc Holliday
Comments: 8
Kudos: 49





	felled by you / held by you

**Author's Note:**

> hmmm. soft wyndoc? soft wyndoc. skimmed but not edited so any and all mistakes are my own. title from nfwmb by hozier. enjoy!

Wynonna never wanted to fall in love with Doc.

Never wanted to feel her tummy turn over when he smiled beneath that damned glorious mustache, or fill with butterflies when that smile was for _her_. Never wanted to fall victim to Georgia southern charm, but that was easier said than done.

It started with little things, as feelings such as these often do, but it felt grand.

Like when he’d disappear for three days only to turn up on the fourth with his hat in his hand and a fifth of Forty Creek with Wynonna’s name on it. Always an apology she’d accept, whether or not she made him immediately aware of that.

Or when, four weeks after they met, he began asking, “Do you mind?” before he sparked up a cigarillo because she’d mentioned offhand how she no longer smoked because of how it made her hair smell. Wynonna never minded how it made him smell; like tobacco and the wild west, she said, like log cabins and summer fires, a smell that was warm and familiar and uniquely Doc.

“Miss Earp,” he’d greet her on the doorstep of the homestead, thumbing the brim of his hat in respect to the woman and the name that meant so much to him even now, a hundred-sixty some years out. Things lasted like that with Doc, for more decades than any one man should be allowed to live. But here he still was, a cowboy with a code, collecting poker chips and hearts.

“ _Doc_ ,” she’d say back, emphasis on the c, and she’d try not to smile lest she let him in on the secret of just how much she enjoyed his unannounced visits.

He didn’t believe in cell phones. Acknowledged their existence, sure, but last time Waverly tried to teach him how to operate a smartphone he dropped the device into a pitcher of ale in frustration and slipped out of Shorty’s with a snarl fit only for a grumpy old man. So Wynonna never knew when he was coming. He was always a pleasant surprise.

Except for when he turned up piss-drunk before Wynonna had a chance to get a drink in and she was reduced to the role of glorified sober babysitter.

He’d slur his words and knock off his hat, she’d pick it up and haul him over the threshold. Dump him on the couch and tuck in right beside so she could lay his head in her lap and draw her fingers through his long hair while he slept like a damned drunk baby.

Those times he was little more than a sloppy surprise. Wynonna figured there were far worse things he could be, and with her drinking resume she had no place to judge, so she let him be.

He never brought her flowers, or chocolates, or any of the standard romantic gifts. Doc’s brand of romance was laced with bullets and instability and Wynonna wouldn’t have it any other way. He brought her a gun on Valentine’s Day, a Colt Python from the seventies he took in place of cash at a poker game. She’d never gotten a better gift. They shot holes in hay bales and guzzled Golden Grain until they hardly remembered their own names, and spent the night twisted between blankets out in the barn. Wynnonna never cared much for romance either, but she reckoned she could get used to that sort of date.

And she did.

Neither Doc nor Wynonna considered it a date if there weren’t firearms and liquor involved.

Sometimes they cooked. Or Wynonna tried to cook and Doc watched from the sidelines with a smoke dangling from his lips and his hat tipped back in amusement. Wynonna was the only one who could stomach her cooking.

Sometimes Doc rolled in with a doe strapped to Charlene’s hood and a proud grin on his face. She liked to watch him skin deer and he liked to show off for her. He was nearly as good with a knife as he was with a gun. Days like those they spent huddled over the little kettle grill out behind the homestead to save themselves the grief of Waverly griping about their cooking fresh kill indoors. It was her house, too, and everyone in town knew Wynonna’d do damn near anything for her baby sister.

Other times they ate out at Shorty’s or called in Thai (which Doc refused to try the first three times, and only relented upon discovering there existed a dish called drunken noodles), or picked off of Waverly’s saucepans when she cooked to meal-prep.

“Couple of idiot teenagers, you are,” Waverly told them once, though not unkindly. She wore a certain fondness on her face whenever she poked fun at them.

“ _Hey_ ,” Wynonna protested at the same time as Doc said, “Hold on now.”

“Idiots in their _twenties_ ,” Wynonna said, “thank you very much.”

“If he’s still in his twenties, I’m six-foot-three.”

Fair.

He _was_ older than the state of Colorado.

“But I am young at heart,” he always said.

“You’re ninety at heart, actually,” Wynonna would say back.

And he’d just grin, big and dopey, thumb his hat, and say, “ma’am,” in the slow drawl that was purely _Doc_.

Wynonna didn’t do physical affection when sober — unless you were Waverly, but that was different — and neither did Doc, so that worked. But when they were seven drinks in and still sipping Angel’s Envy like juice you couldn’t keep more than a few inches between them; Doc’s right hand liked to slide home low on Wynonna’s back, her left forearm liked to perch up on his shoulder while her knuckles stroked the stubble on his jaw. Sometimes she took his chin in her hand and held him steady while she planted a kiss on his cheek, which he claimed was sappy, but he always let her. She liked to mess with his hair, too, get her fingers all lost and twisted up in the locks at the nape of his neck. She thought he liked that a lot more than he let on if his flushed face was anything to go by.

When they were sober much of their physical contact was saved for the bedroom (or the forest, or the barn, or that one time on the hood of Doc’s car in the dead of night). Sex was a language they were fluent in with or without the aid of alcohol. He knew where she liked to be touched — low on her waist, high on her thighs, down the full length of her spine — and she knew it didn’t matter to him where her hands were so long as he could feel them on his skin. Sex was easy for Doc and Wynonna because they weren’t obligated to talk during, and they had problems with communication on occasion.

So when they couldn’t talk they fucked.

Like the time Doc forgot her twenty-fourth birthday (she wasn’t counting on him to remember, but was upset nonetheless when he didn’t) and she didn’t know whether to yell at him or tell him not to worry about it so she took him out to the barn instead, poured him a drink, climbed on his lap, and rode him as any good cowgirl should.

Or the time he put his car through a telephone pole and was more upset about the damage to the vehicle than he was the gash in his forehead or the bruised ribs. He fled the scene and stalked out to the homestead, drank the house dry, and cried. It took Wynonna a day or two to understand the tears; that car was the first thing that was his and his alone since the eighteen-hundreds. It wasn’t about the car, she realized, but about the fact that he’d ruined the first real thing he’d bought himself in nearly two-hundred years. But in the moment she just sat with him until his eyes dried, kept quiet, and once his breath steadied she kissed him. That was the gentlest kiss ever shared between Doc and Wynonna and when he took her right there on the couch it was the gentlest he’d ever fucked her.

Forget his faults, his setbacks, and all the bullshit he loved to get himself into — Wynonna didn’t care about any of those things. All she cared was that he was _there_ , and that he always came back. And he did, even when she thought he wouldn’t. Every time.

And she really didn’t mean to fall in love with him and his stupid mustache and his excess of bourbon and that incredibly outdated hat. She’d tried so hard to guard herself from what she believed would only end in turmoil, had tried to hide her feelings in case he came along and took advantage of them, but she’d also never met someone so synchronistically in tune with who she was as a human being than John Henry Holliday.

And perhaps she never wanted to fall in love with him, but few things ever happen in Purgatory as one intends them to.


End file.
